


ever-dying stars

by alderations



Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [27]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Apocalypse, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Character Death, Dismemberment, Eldritch, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Mechtober, Prison, Tentacles, Whump, Whumptober 2020, what if prisonmechs didnt get out in time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:34:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27241252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: Marius finishes carving a hole in the cell door just in time to feel the first tremor rock through the prison.“We have approximately fifteen minutes before the Aurora’s safety is compromised,” Ivy informs him. Her voice is shaking. When Marius turns back to look at her, she’s wrapped up in Raphaella’s wings as if they could begin to protect her from what’s coming.Shaking off the fear of impending doom, Marius reaches through the hole in the door to open it from the other side. “We’re fast, and they’re distracted. It’ll be fine.”(Whumptober Day 27: extreme weather/earthquakes; Mechtober Day 25-27: TBI/tentacles)
Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [27]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950916
Comments: 9
Kudos: 33
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	ever-dying stars

**Author's Note:**

> this is your extra reminder to heed the tags! this one's gory!

Marius finishes carving a hole in the cell door just in time to feel the first tremor rock through the prison.

“We have approximately fifteen minutes before the Aurora’s safety is compromised,” Ivy informs him. Her voice is shaking. When Marius turns back to look at her, she’s wrapped up in Raphaella’s wings as if they could begin to protect her from what’s coming.

Shaking off the fear of impending doom, Marius reaches through the hole in the door to open it from the other side. “We’re fast, and they’re distracted. It’ll be fine.”

The three of them flee the cell without sparing a second glance for the concrete block in which they’ve spent the past sixty years. They’ve grown attached to this world in many ways, but that doesn’t mean much to a Mechanism, all things considered. Besides, there’s no use getting sentimental in the last minutes of this system’s paltry existence.

After climbing three flights of stairs and knocking out a few panicked guards, they reach the first above-ground level of the building, and that’s when things start to go  _ very  _ wrong. The ground shakes under them again, hard enough that Marius almost topples into the wall, and before he can draw closer to Raphaella and Ivy in search of some stability, something crashes in from the first window they’ve seen thus far.

It’s massive, nearly as wide around as Marius’s waist, and oily-black with a slick sheen that glimmers in every imaginable color as it reflects the sunlight. It’s still sunny outside, which seems  _ wrong  _ given the fact that the world seems to be collapsing around them, but Marius doesn’t have time to ponder that. The thing rushes toward him and he glimpses rows and rows of suckers contracting underneath it, before it wraps around his metal arm. “Of course it’d be fucking  _ tentacles,”  _ he mutters.

The tentacle doesn’t respond. Instead, it snakes up to Marius’s elbow and starts to wedge its end under the lip of the metal, as if trying to worm its way into Marius’s flesh. “Hey,  _ hey,  _ what the fuck?” he yelps, while Raphaella flutters forward and pulls a knife out of her waistband to hack at the tentacle.

“Hold still,” she commands Marius. As soon as the blade touches the squirming flesh, however, she realizes that it’s not solid enough to  _ cut,  _ instead giving way and reforming as the weapon moves through it. She tries again, and again, as curious as she is frustrated, until the tentacle decides it’s had enough and yanks Marius out through the broken window.

There, another half-dozen squamous appendages descend on him. Raphaella and Ivy can barely chase after him in time to watch the first one pry Marius’s mechanism from the bleeding remains of his arm, leaving a few twisted wires dangling where the end of his humerus should be. His screams only seem to encourage the rest of the tentacles, which, no longer impeded by whatever power his mechanism holds, tear off chunks of skin and muscle with all the wild glee of a kitten learning to hunt.

It’s nothing the Mechanisms have never seen before. But one glance around the prison yard shows them that Marius is relatively lucky compared to the Midgardian mortals. Some are dead, some dying, but so many more are trapped in the throes of some endless torment, twisted or bleeding or frozen or melting or dividing or shattered or all-seeing. Raphaella’s curiosity has just started to overtake what little horror she’s capable of feeling when a new tentacle erupts from the earth and latches on to her left wing.

The breath is punched from her lungs before she can scream as her wing is ripped from its socket and dashed into the ground in a spray of broken silver feathers. Another tentacle follows suit with her right wing, but that’s not  _ enough  _ for them, and both tentacles return to her back to attack the ports where her wings once connected to her scapulae. She can’t see what they’re doing, though she doesn’t  _ need  _ to see to know how the metal tears from her skin and leaves her gasping and bleeding until the other tentacles begin to dismantle her from the outside in. Marius is already gone, she can tell, and she’s not sure what became of his mechanism in the roiling mass of tentacles still sprouting from the ground and the sky and the spaces in between.

She can’t see Ivy. If she  _ could  _ turn her head, she’s not sure that she would, even to see Ivy for another moment before she dies.

Ivy, for her part, watches Raphaella’s wings crash to the ground with dreadful certainty bubbling in her throat, before a fresh set of tentacles attacks her. It takes mere seconds for them to find the external access panel to her mechanism, and they slide it open and closed a few times, probing at the ports inside, before holding her down and peeling her skin away with a horrible  _ rip  _ of collagen. Her skull presents more of a problem, at least until one of the larger tentacles comes crashing down on her head hard enough to split it along the sagittal suture and reveal the pulsing metal beneath. Ivy thrashes and wails and begs, but a handful of tentacles are already pulling out the strings of arachnoid mater covering her brain, until they can scoop her mechanism out and sever its connection to what remains of her spinal cord.

Luckily, her death is almost instant.

That doesn’t stop the tentacles from flaying her flesh as they did with Marius and Raphaella, apparently determined to extract any remaining shred of mechanism. By the time they’re done, the parched grass outside the prison is caked with viscera and shards of bone. Their Mechanisms lie discarded underneath an old barbed-wire fence: Marius’s arm, fingers bent backwards and metal plating twisted and torn; Raphaella’s wings, feathers tattered and broken; and Ivy’s brain, still bleeding out from all the channels and cavities where her human blood once fed into it.

Its work now finished, the screaming squamous void moves on to feast elsewhere.

**Author's Note:**

> remember yesterday when I said I was overdue for a vent fic,
> 
> anyway what if prison mechs didn't make it out in time, would that be fucked up or what? thanks to the power of Me Having A Keyboard, we can all consider that concept now : ) anyway now that the Incredible Violence is out of my system, the next four days will hopefully be Delicious and then I can go back to being a normal human who does things other than hurt physical characters. sometimes.
> 
> comment if you'd like? ESPECIALLY if i missed any tags! literally anything i will tag anything. i love u all. take care of urselves.


End file.
